(Image source: Georgia State University Research Magazine)

During his eulogy at Aretha Franklin’s funeral in 2018, Reverend Jasper Williams, Jr. shocked many in attendance, as well as the wider Black community, when he attacked Black families and Black culture instead of honoring the woman dubbed “the Queen of Soul.”

“Where is your soul Black man when I look into your house, there are no fathers in the home no more. 70 percent of our households are led by our precious, proud, fine Black women. But as proud, beautiful, and fine as our Black women are, one thing a Black woman cannot do, a Black woman cannot raise a boy to be a man. She can’t do that.”

Responding to backlash in his eulogy’s wake, Rev. Williams stood by his comments saying, “In order to change America, we must change black America’s culture… We must do it through parenting. In order for the parenting to go forth, it has to be done in the home.”

Rev. Williams is but one prominent voice in a long history of religious, cultural, and political leaders who depicts the high rate of Black births outside of marriage—and Black single mothers—as a moral failure. These “authorities” blame Black “culture” and “immorality” for a diverse range of issues Black Americans face, from poverty to violence to incarceration.

Often neglected in these conversations, however, is that the breakdown of the traditional Black family is a relatively new phenomenon; it began in the 1960s and directly connects to the prison boom fueled by governmental policies targeting African American men. Similar to Black families who were enslaved and torn apart through forced sales or death, generations of Black men and their families faced forced separation and inhumane treatment through mass incarceration—and the effects are ongoing. For a large segment of the Black population living in segregated, under-resourced, and over-policed neighborhoods, governmental policies that targeted Black men for incarceration contributed to the decline of intact Black families; faith in God, religious practices, and belief in marriage was not what could protect them.

Slavery and the Black Family

During the 246 years of American slavery, enslaved Black people could not legally marry or lay claim to their own children. In “The History of Slave Marriage in the United States,” Darlene Goring, Louisiana State University professor of law, explains that enslaved people of African descent could not legally marry because they were considered chattel property, and could not enter into any binding contract, including marriage. Enslaved people “could not confer legitimacy upon their children, even those born to putative slave marriages.”

Black men had no ability to protect or provide for their wives or children, who could be physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by the white enslavers or sold away, never to be seen again. The testimony of one Black man, John S. Jacobs, who was born into slavery in 1815 and escaped to freedom in adulthood reflects this situation:

“To be a man, and not to be a man—a father without authority—a husband and no protector—is the darkest of fates. Such was the condition of my father, and such is the condition of every slave throughout the United States: he owns nothing, he can claim nothing. His wife is not his: his children are not his; they can be taken from him, and sold at any minute, as far away from each other as the human fleshmonger may see fit to carry them.”

Enslaved Black women, whether they had a Black male partner or not, were at risk of sexual abuse, assault, and impregnation by the white men who enslaved them. A 2020 study examining the DNA of 50,000 people whose grandparents were born in U.S. regions touched by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade found that European men contributed three times more to the gene pool of African Americans than European women, meaning white enslavers regularly raped, impregnated, and forced Black women to bear their children. Those white men, for the most part, did not acknowledge their children’s paternity, nor suffer social stigma for fathering children with Black women they enslaved and left to raise on their own.

Although they were denied marital rights while enslaved, after the Civil War Black women embraced the institution of marriage. Following emancipation and for the next fifty years, from 1890 through 1940, Black women, on average, married at an earlier age than white women. In 1950, Black women between the ages of 40 to 44 were more likely to have married than their white women counterparts.

Studies of Black Americans in the 1960s

Two important reports published in the 1960s sounded the alarm about critical issues facing Black Americans: The Moynihan Report and the Kerner Report. Both were written to critique civil rights legislation. Moynihan, a historian and eventual U.S. senator, wanted President Johnson to know that legislation alone would not remedy racial inequality. The Kerner Commission, on the other hand, argued that legislation had not gone far enough and much more government intervention was needed to achieve racial equality. While the latter was largely ignored and forgotten, the former still influences American perceptions of Black America. Moynihan concluded that the decline in traditional Black marriages and absence of married Black fathers in households were the main reasons African Americans faced inequality and adversity. His recommendations included adhering to patriarchal Christian notions of family, a perspective that remains foundational for many conservative Americans, both Black and white.

To mark the 50^th anniversary of Moynihan’s 1965 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, the Atlantic published an annotated version of the report by historian Daniel Geary. Geary summarized Moynihan’s key points:

“Moynihan claimed that family instability was the main reason why African Americans would fail to achieve equal results with other American groups. He traced the roots of the problems he perceived in African American family structure to slavery and past discrimination. However, because Moynihan argued that African Americans’ own characteristics, and not ongoing institutional racism, explained their failure to compete on equal terms, some critics charged him with ‘blaming the victim.’”

As an Irish Catholic, Moynihan held Christian notions about the importance of traditional, patriarchal families. He believed that model was superior to any other family structure. According to Geary, Moynihan asserted “that the family was the basic unit of society derived in part from his Catholicism, which he credited with giving him the perspective that ‘family interests were perhaps the central objective of social policy.’” But Moynihan’s claim that the cause of Black “pathology” was the breakdown of Black families was hypocritical: the last time Moynihan saw his own white father was before he abandoned the family when Moynihan was ten.

Even in its day, the report was controversial, with some praising it and others condemning it, including prominent African Americans, feminists, and civil rights activists. In 1971, psychologist William Ryan coined the term “blaming the victim” to refute Moynihan’s claims and to show how blaming African Americans for their unequal place in society allowed whites to justify anti-Black racism and social injustice.

The Kerner Report came on the heels of major unrest in African American communities and directly refuted Moynihan’s thesis that Black pathology was the cause of racial inequality. In July 1967, after two years of major uprisings in nearly 50 Black communities across the country, President Lyndon B Johnson signed an executive order forming the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Chaired by former Illinois governor Otto Kerner, the 11-member Presidential Commission worked to investigate the cause of the uprisings. After seven months of fact-finding, the Commission released the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Report, on February 29, 1968.

In stark contrast to the Moynihan report, the Kerner Commission report placed the blame squarely on the anti-Black racism and white supremacy permeating every aspect of American society. “This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”

Though the report became an instant bestseller, President Johnson was disappointed that it didn’t credit his administration’s Great Society programs for its influence on Black progress. Johnson was also upset that the report highlighted the extreme disparities still facing Black Americans. He lamented privately that the report called for solutions he did not have the political capital to obtain. Johnson complained to Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, that the commission recommended his administration spend $80 million to rectify racial inequity. After over a decade of funding the Vietnam War and rising inflation, he did not believe his budget was substantial enough to cover those costs. Johnson never publicly mentioned the report.

The Kerner Report detailed the numerous issues plaguing Black communities, none of which had to do with a lack of morality or the breakdown of the traditional family unit. Historian and author Alice George sums up the report’s finding in Smithsonian Magazine’s “The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened.”

“Bad policing practices, a flawed justice system, unscrupulous consumer credit practices, poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter suppression, and other culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination all converged to propel violent upheaval on the streets of African-American neighborhoods in American cities, north and south, east and west. And as black unrest arose, inadequately trained police officers and National Guard troops entered affected neighborhoods, often worsening the violence.”

The Kerner Commission Report had many recommendations to remedy racial inequality. The proposals included enforcing laws to end employment discrimination, increasing the minimum wage, creating one million new jobs in the public sector, and encouraging Black business ownership. It also included expanding opportunities for loans in the “ghetto,” developing efforts to eliminate segregation in schools, providing quality education in Black neighborhoods, producing 600,000 low and moderate-income housing units by the next year and six million units over five years, and changing police operations to end misconduct and provide more adequate police protection.

The Johnson Administration only adopted one recommendation from the report, which was to try to develop Black community support for law enforcement, including hiring more Black officers.

Two months after the Kerner report was released, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and uprisings erupted in over 125 cities across the country. Johnson chose not to run for reelection, and Richard Nixon, who had criticized the Kerner report and promised to “meet force with force, if necessary, in the cities,” was elected to the presidency.

What the Moynihan and Kerner commission reports did agree upon, however, was that the levels of Black unemployment and under unemployment was untenable. That situation only grew more dire after the 1960s. In 1970, 70% of African Americans in the “urban core” of large metropolitan cities, worked in manufacturing. By 1987, following deindustrialization and the migration of American industries overseas, the industrial employment of Black men sank to 28 percent; crack cocaine scourged Black communities, and violence spiked with rival groups trying to control the illicit drug trade.

(Illustration by Angela Hsieh for NPR)

Rather than infuse millions of dollars into Black communities, as suggested by the Kerner commission, the federal government’s response to these issues was to wage war. Johnson first called for a War on Crime in March 1965. After Moynihan’s report, Johnson turned away from his War on Poverty and toward funding, training, and arming law enforcement to surveil and police African Americans. Nixon greatly expanded these policies and called for a War on Drugs in 1971; he also expanded the prison system to hold larger segments of the Black population for much longer sentences. By 1984, the Black unemployment rate had nearly quadrupled since the 1950s. Between 1984 and 2005, the number of federal and state prison and jail facilities were built at an average rate of one every 8.5 days. Federal and state governments poured trillions of dollars into funding an overwhelmingly white male workforce to staff the lucrative prison industry, from policing to corrections to prosecution to prison construction, and at the expense of the lowest-income and most marginalized Black Americans.

Incarceration and the Decline of Black Marriages

Statistics regarding the high number of Black births to unmarried women today are often weaponized to paint Black women as immoral and Black men as absent fathers who do not provide for their families. Most people do not connect the Black out-of-wedlock birth rate with the American prison boom. Pew Research shows that the percentage of unmarried American women giving birth started to rise in 1980 (18.4%) and climbed every year until it peaked in 2009 (41%), with Black women disproportionately having the highest number of out-of-wedlock births. During the “prison boom,” from 1973 through 2009, The Sentencing Project found that there was a seven-fold increase in the prison population. “Between 1985 and 1995 alone, the total prison population grew an average of eight percent annually. And between 1990 and 1995, all states, with the exception of Maine, substantially increased their prison populations.”

Although Black men only made up around 6 to 7 percent of the American population, they accounted for the largest percentage of people locked up during the prison boom. In “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration,” Bruce Western and Christopher Wilden, sociologists and leading scholars on mass incarceration, detail:

“In the twenty-five years from 1980, the incarceration rate tripled among white men in their twenties, but fewer than 2 percent were behind bars by 2004. Imprisonment rates for young black men increased less quickly, but one in seven were in custody by 2004. Incarceration rates are much higher among male highs school dropouts in their twenties…Incredibly, 34 percent of all young black male high school dropouts were in prison or jail on an average day in 2004, an incarceration rate forty times higher than the national average.”

After his election in November 1993, President Bill Clinton spoke to a convocation of the Church of God in Christ in Memphis, the same church where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his last speech. Echoing Moynihan and what Rev. Jasper Williams would preach 25 years later, Clinton said:

“But unless we deal with the ravages of crime and drugs and violence and unless we recognize that it’s due to the breakdown of the family, the community, and the disappearance of jobs, and unless we say some of this cannot be done by Government, because we have to reach deep inside to the values, the spirit, the soul, and the truth of human nature, none of the other things we seek to do will ever take us where we need to go.”

While individuals are ultimately responsible for their behavior, Clinton’s emphasis on the breakdown of the family, as well as his suggestion that Black people need to connect with their “spirit” and “soul,” grossly oversimplified complex factors that contributed to violence, drug use, and drug sales in Black neighborhoods. No amount of prayer or marriages could bring back manufacturing jobs or other living-wage employment for blue collar Black men, or account for the lost tax revenue from the white residents and middle-class Black Americans who fled to the suburbs and took their small businesses with them. Nor could nuclear families or frequent church visits fund chronically underfunded public education, health care, mental health support, and addiction treatment in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

One year after his speech, Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was the largest crime bill in history, allocating $10 billion for prison construction, expanding the death penalty, and eliminating federal funding for incarcerated people to pay for college. Activist and author Premilla Nadasen wrote, “The act intensified police surveillance and racial profiling, and locked up millions for nonviolent offenses, such as drug possession.” According to Bruce Western, “By 2000, among non-college black men, aged 22 to 30, the jobless rate… stood at 29.9 percent.” When Western adjusted the unemployment rate to include Black men excluded from the employment market because of incarceration, the actual Black male unemployment rate for that age group was 42.1 percent. Black women fared even worse after Clinton’s welfare “reform,” which elevated the number of Black women in poverty or prison, forcing numerous children into foster care.

Rather than assist Black communities, these policies led to increased racial profiling; Black people were disproportionately arrested and incarcerated for drug-related offenses, even though Americans across ethnic backgrounds use drugs at similar rates. The National Institute on Drug Abuse’s study first published in 1995, and revised in both 1998 and 2003, found that whites, non-white Hispanics, and African Americans had recently used illegal drugs at a percentage (6.4 percent) indistinguishable from each other. According to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, arrests for simple possession of marijuana “accounted for nearly 80 percent of the growth in drug arrests in the 1990s.” The ACLU also documented that between 2001 and 2010, there were over 8 million marijuana arrests, of which 88 percent were only for marijuana possession. A 2000 Human Rights Watch report called the racial disparities in Black incarceration for drug offenses a “national scandal.” In ten of the worst offending states, Black men were sent to prison on drug charges at 27 to 57 times the rate of white men.

For Black incarcerated men, religious beliefs or practices did little to alleviate the burdens placed on them and their families during and after imprisonment. Western and Wildeman noted that imprisonment “significantly alters the life course” of a man by disrupting his chances at gainful employment, creating legal barriers to skilled and licensed occupations, hindering access to welfare benefits and public housing, and diminishing the likelihood of marriage or cohabiting with the mothers of his children. In 2009, only 16.7 percent of Black men had been married by age 25, compared to 28.7 percent of white men and 32.8 percent of Hispanic men. By 2010, 45 percent of Black children had a parent who was incarcerated. Incarceration disrupted the potential for traditional Black marriages among scores of low-income Black men; it left many Black women to raise their children as single mothers.

In spite of Clinton’s and Rev. Williams’s belief that issues facing the Black community could not be remedied by the government, the opposite was true. Federal and state policies aimed at lowering the number of incarcerated people in overcrowded prisons did lead to declining imprisonment rates. This caused a sea change for Black men, despite the Black rate of births outside marriage peaking at 72% in 2010 (that also marks the end of the prison boom) and holding steady for almost a decade. As illuminated in a new study, from 2009 to 2019, the incarceration risk of young Black men fell by 44 percent. This coincided with Barack Obama’s presidency, during which time Obama passed legislation to reform drug policy and expand access to healthcare with the Affordable Care Act. Unsurprisingly, the rate of incarceration of Black men and women fell every year. From 2000 to 2020 violent crime in America, and youth offenses also dropped, in spite of the declining rate of traditional marriages across all ethnic backgrounds. In 2021, the rate of unwed Black births had declined to 70.1% compared to 68.5% for Indigenous women, and 52.2% for Hispanic women.

Though the rate of white women giving birth outside of marriage today (27.5%) is now higher than the Black rate (23.6%) when Moynihan wrote his report in 1965, there are no reports about the moral failings of “white culture” or “white pathology.” Like Moynihan, Clinton, and Rev. Williams, too many Americans continue to view the low rate of traditional Black marriages through a moral lens. They insist that Western Christian notions of traditional marriage will solve vast social problems.

The time has come to stop blaming Black people, culture, and the decline of traditional Black marriage for the persistent issues African Americans face. There are advantages for children raised in a household with both parents fully participating and financially contributing to childrearing and schooling. Yet, the government must do its part by remedying centuries of stolen wealth, oppression, and inequality inflicted on Black people. This requires ending the drug war, reducing prison populations, decriminalizing and diverting many offenses to end unnecessary police contact, racial profiling, and court involvement, and investing in Black communities by fully funding education, healthcare, substance abuse treatment, community resource centers, and violence prevention.

Alessandra Harris is a writer, author, wife, and mother of four, who earned degrees in comparative religious studies and Middle East studies. Her fourth book, In the Shadow of Freedom: An Enduring Call for Racial Justice, is forthcoming from Orbis Books in spring 2024.